In this project a highly interdisciplinary team of 10 European Universities covering fields from perception, neuroscience, engineering and robotics work together with the ultimate goal to understand and learn from the highly sophisticated human dexterous abilities. In our group we are focussing on questions related to human multisensory perception necessary for interacting with the environment and for manipulating objects. Read more on Job: Postoc position at Bielefeld University on EU funded project “The Hand Embodied”…

A University of Pittsburgh Medical Center uses telepresence technology to provide live support for surgeons in other countries who have difficulty replicating complex new procedures.

Since 2005, its cranial base surgical team of three neurosurgeons and two otolaryngologists have trained more than 500 surgeons from more than 30 countries on treatment tumors and other conditions affecting the base of skull, nasal, and sinus areas, and some areas of the brain.

About 60 percent of those who come for a four-day course are international physicians, but once back home they often send emails seeking help, Carl Snyderman, M.D., one of the telementoring leaders, toldHealthcare Informatics.

Videogames 2012 – Annual Conference in Science and Art of Videogames will be organized by the research line “Media, Technology, Contexts” of the Research Center for Communication and Culture (CECC), at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal, and the Portuguese Society of Videogame Sciences (SPCV).The SPCV conferences take place annually and have come to constitute significant venues to promote research as well as debate and foster the videogames industry. The conference hosts researchers and professionals in this area, and aims at promoting the dissemination of work in the field and facilitating exchanging experience between the academic community and the industry. This 5th conference seeks to assert itself as a multidisciplinary event, looking for contributions from several scientific areas including art, game design and narrative, computational aspects, as well as videogames theoretical and critical analysis regarding practices and applications that encompass the market and the industry. Original and high quality submissions are expected, from both the academic community and the gaming industry.

A study shows that using virtual reality an arm up to three or possibly even four times the length of a person’s real arm can be felt as if it was the person’s own arm, even if it incorporates strong asymmetries in the body shape.

It is explained in the article “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion”, published in the journal PLoS ONE and signed by researchers Mel Slater, Konstantina Kilteni and Jean-Marie Normand, from the Event Lab at the Faculty of Psychology of the UB and from the Catalan Institution for Research Advanced Studies (ICREA), together with Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, from the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) and ICREA.

It is believed that our bodies are fixed and unchangeable except through the slow process of growing and ageing. Over recent years there have been research results that defy this common sense view – it seems that the human brain will quickly accept gross changes in the body – incorporating external objects such as a rubber arm into the body representation, and even whole bodies seen in virtual reality.

The authors of the article have added another dimension to this illusion of body ownership. Using virtual reality they have shown that a virtual body with one very long arm can be incorporated into body representation. An arm up to three or possibly even four times the length of a person’s real arm can be felt as if it was the person’s own arm. This is notwithstanding the fact that having one such long arm introduces a gross asymmetry in the body. An extended body space (a body with longer limbs occupies more volume than a normal body) affects also the special space surrounding our body that is called peripersonal space – a space that when violated by objects or other people can be experienced as a threat or intimacy, depending on the context. Read more on Extending body space: Long virtual arms perceived as part of users’ body…

Here are the five prospective pre-constituted panels looking for participants from the Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group (VGSSIG) of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) for the Chicago 2013 SCMS conference.

26 July 2012—Canon begins selling a next-generation form of virtual reality technology known as mixed reality (MR) this month. The company suggests its version of MR is an enhanced, more grown-up version of the augmented reality provided by some smartphone apps and things like Google’s Project Glass. In contrast to augmented reality, which typically adds text or simple graphics to what the user sees, Canon’s MR adds computer-generated virtual objects to the real world in real time, at full scale, and in three dimensions.

In a further contrast to consumer-oriented augmented-reality schemes, the technology is initially targeted at engineering groups involved in designing and building new products. Canon claims that not only will it cut down on prototyping, it will also speed up concurrent engineering by allowing those involved on the manufacturing side to get a faster look at what is coming down the new-product pipeline. Read more on Trying out Canon’s mixed-reality tech…

December 16, 2012 08:30-12:00
at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2012)
to be held in Orlando Florida, USA from December 16-19, 2012

ICIS (http://icis2012.aisnet.org/) is the major annual international meeting of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), which has over 4,000 members representing universities in over 95 countries worldwide. It is the most prestigious gathering of academics and practitioners in the IS discipline, and provides a forum for networking and sharing of latest ideas and highest caliber scientific work among the IS professions. Each year, over 1,000 IS academic professions from around the world participate in the conference program, which includes about 60 sessions and 180 presentations, in addition to keynotes, CIO panels, and research panels.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (http://jvwresearch.org), following a successful workshop in Shanghai at ICIS 2011, will host a special face-2-face workshop on Augmented Reality.

In his influential essay from 1977 titled ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger advanced the thesis that human relationships with animals are predominantly shaped by representation. The essay argued that the increase of animal representation, which began at the end of the nineteenth century, constituted a phenomenon directly linked to the increasing disappearance of live animals in our everyday lives. Today animals have conspicuously emerged in video games and alternative reality scenarios, posing pressing questions about representation and interaction at a time when the virtual world seems to be on the brink of overshadowing the material one. This issue of Antennae will gather a range of perspectives in the attempt of mapping the current state of affairs with the ‘virtual animal’. Read more on Call: Antennae: The Virtual Animal…